Wave of unaccompanied children flee Central America for US border

U.S. Flies 38 to Honduras in Expedited Deportation4:52

Thirty eight women and children recently detained at the U.S. border were flown home to Honduras on Monday, in what U.S. officials say is the first of an expected increase in expedited deportations. WSJ's Laura Meckler discusses on Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero. Photo: Getty

THOUSANDS of children — some as young as three – are fleeing their homes alone to cross the southern US-Mexican border. But a bitter war with Americans who don’t want them awaits.

The US is experiencing an unprecedented wave of unaccompanied children swarming across their borders as gang violence and poverty force them to flee.

Now the US House of Representatives has been forced to extend its session – delaying a five week summer recess — to help resolve the flow of unaccompanied children over the border.

The tidal wave of children – expected to reach 90,000 by the end of next month – has created an unprecedented humanitarian crisis for the Obama government

In Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the three countries that make up Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” locals are exposed to poverty, endemic gang violence and other dangerous organised crime syndicates that fight — and kill — to control drug trafficking routes, neighbourhoods, bus systems and human-smuggling rings.

Already, more than 57,000 unaccompanied children have either surrendered or been caught by the US Border Patrol, up from 15,700 in 2011.

Detained ... an immigrant who was detained at the border is held inside the McAllen Border Patrol Station in McAllen, Texas in an area for juveniles 14 and under. Picture: APSource:AP

Most have come from Central America, including 15,000 of them from Honduras, more than double last year’s number and five times the 2012 tally.

About 12,500 Guatemalan children have come along with 12,000 Mexican children and 11,500 from El Salvador this year.

While some flee to seek refuge on their own, others are leaving to reunite with family members already in the US.

The clash over children being treated humanely as refugees or being immediately deported has sparked a heated stalemate in the US Congress.

This week, the US Congress heard from children including Mayeli Hernandez, 12, who told them how she and her sister fled Hondouras to escape ongoing violence to seek safety in the US.

“Please help protect children like me and my little sister,” she said.

Speaking softly through a translator, said she made the trip to get care for her nine-year-old sister, who suffers from epilepsy, to rejoin their mother, who had left years before.

She said she witnessed two separate murders.

“It was very ugly to see the blood running on the ground,” she said.

“I was scared that I would be killed like those men.”

Hernandez also told of how badly they were treated once they crossed the border, to highlight the need for better conditions.

“But when I suffered a lot was after we crossed the river and the police took us into a freezing cold police station,” she said.

“We had to sleep on the floor and we only had a thin linen blanket. There wasn’t enough food.”

Without a clear solution in sight, it’s clear the illegal arrival of children are continuing to spark widespread protest and political debate across the US.

Needing help ... Mayeli Hernandez, 12, wipes tears as she tells her story of escaping her home country of Honduras at a hearing before the Congressional Progressive Caucus in Washington, DC. Picture: Alex WongSource:AFP

WHY ARE CHILDREN FLEEING IN SUCH HIGH NUMBERS?

Many young children are witnessing their friends being killed, and don’t want to be the next victim.

In Honduras, which has the highest homicide rate in the world, 12-year-old Maynor Serrano recalled seeing rows of houses where his friends and neighbours used to live.

All are gone — many have fled to the US.

Two of his friends were killed as 10-year-olds, after their bodies were chopped to pieces in a suspected gang vendetta.

He has seen homes reduced to crumbling wrecks, their walls pockmarked with bullet holes.

Some houses have become casas locas — crazy homes for torturing families in this macabre city.

Like many, Maynor yearns to escape to the US, where he has relatives.

“It’s tough to live without hope,” he said. “If it’s not there, you go look for it.”

For Honduras, the mass exodus of children stems from a social crisis with deep roots.

Beyond the American fast-food chains and high-end malls lies a city of 900,000 haunted by remnants of the Central American wars of the 1980s, the root cause of the current crisis, experts say.

Escaping to survive ... a young migrant girl waits for a freight train to depart on her way to the US border, in Ixtepec, Mexico. Picture: Eduardo VerdugoSource:AP

The region is still marked by political instability, land disputes and, more recently, the explosion of gangs, including the MS-13 and MS-18.

Those gangs, known as Maras, were spawned in the ghettos of Los Angeles and other US cities, drawing their members from earlier waves of Central American immigrants. As these members were arrested, incarcerated and eventually deported, they re-established their criminal organisations in the struggling countries of Central America.

Over the years they have grown into powerful crime networks, joining forces with Mexican cartels, including the Zetas, which use this Central American country as a pathway between South and North America. The result is pervasive violence.

Central American migrants ... climb on a north bound train for the US border. Picture: Eduardo VerdugoSource:AP

In El Salvador, the situation is similar.

In a recent report titled Children on the Run from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 15-year-old Maritza explains why she fled.

“In El Salvador they take young girls, rape them and throw them in plastic bags. My uncle told me it wasn’t safe for me to stay there. They told him that on April 3, and I left on April 7. They said if I was still there on April 8, they would grab me, and I didn’t know what would happen,” she said.

Many who flee are teenage boys age 15 to 17, but White House officials have said the children are getting younger and more girls are also coming across the border alone.

Data on where they are exactly coming from can be seen below in this map compiled by US Customs and Border Protection.

HOW ARE THEY GETTING TO THE US-MEXICAN BORDER?

New forces are helping push out the waves of young people pouring over the southern border.

“El Lobo”, or wolf, and “El Pollero”, or coyote, are the terms used for these Mexican immigration smugglers.

These specialised human traffickers can make up to $2,500 taking children to the US border.

To cross the border via the most popular route, the Rio Grande Valley, is another possible $1,000 in fees.

“If they’re small — three or four years old — I cross them in inner tubes one by one, to make sure they don’t fall out or drown. It only takes a few minutes,” one El Lobo said in a recent National Public Radio interview.

Known as “The Wolf”, he told NPR he now specialises in smuggling children because it’s easier and just as profitable as smuggling adults.

First, his organisation can take a group of Central American children in a bus through Mexico and evade Mexican authorities looking for adult immigrants to deport.

Taking a risk ... Central American migrants climb on a north bound train during their journey toward the US-Mexico border. Picture: Eduardo VerdugoSource:AP

Then, once he crosses the Rio Grande Valley, he doesn’t have to continue with the group to San Antonio or Houston — the most dangerous part of the journey.

“Children just give themselves up [to the Border Patrol],” he explains.

“Adults have to flee.”

He also emphasises he works as a freelance, and is not part of the Gulf Cartel or Los Zetas, which control all river access on the Mexican side of the lower Rio Grande Valley.

Like all freelance smugglers, to use the river he has to pay the cartel a user’s fee.

US Republican politician Kay Granger recently told Republican politicians she was surprised to learn that coyotes are charging between $6,000-$9,000 per person in Guatemala.

The group was also told one coyote was making $50,000 a week smuggling children into the US.

Many also bribe municipal, state, or federal police at the Guatemala-Mexico border and a lengthy ride on one of two northbound cargo trains known as “The Beast.”

Moving on ... a Central American immigrant and her children sit inside the so-called La Bestia (The Beast) cargo train, in an attempt to reach the Mexico-US border. Picture: Elizabeth RuizSource:AFP

DO THEY ALL SURVIVE THE JOURNEY?

Unfortunately no. Gilberto Ramos, a 15-year-old boy from Guatemala, was found lying dead in the Texas desert after he risked his life to help save his mother.

Gilberto has now become a symbol for the perils faced by a record flood of unaccompanied children from Central America who are crossing illegally into the US.

Authorities said that Gilberto was one of the youngest known such children to die crossing the desert. He was shirtless, having likely suffered heat stroke, but still wearing the rosary his mother gave him before he left.

Lost boy ... Gilberto Francisco Ramos, a 15-year-old boy who died in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, while trying to reach the United States on his own. Picture: Johan OrdonezSource:AFP

He wanted to go to the US to earn money to treat his mother’s epilepsy.

Gilberto set out on May 17 with a change of clothes and a backpack along the same path as his brother, walking the rugged road to the centre of town and then hitching a ride to Chiantla to meet up with the smuggler, known as a coyote.

The trip cost $5,400, and the family had borrowed $2,600 of that, paying $2,000 the first week of the journey and another $600 the week before he died. They still owe the debt.

His father Francisco Ramos said: “The coyote told me that he was going to take him to a safe place and I believed him. But that was the fate of my son.”

Other reports have emerged of young children dying while trying to cross Rio Grande in the water.

Harsh conditions ... illegal immigrants wading across the Rio Grande with the help of two "coyotes" or smugglers in an attempt to cross illegally into the United States in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.Source:AP

WHY THE US AND NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY?

A spate of rumours — widely circulated over social media — have suggested that relaxed policies in the US make this a critical time for Central Americans to move north.

“The rumours grew rampant, like wildfire,” said Nelson Garcia Lobo, director of a Mennonite church group known as the Commission of Mennonite Social Action. His organisation represents some of the poorest barrios in the country, whose residents are often targeted by smugglers.

“They’re the most vulnerable ones,” Garcia Lobo said.

“Suddenly, many saw hope.”

“We have been overwhelmed with stories of ‘it’s now or never,’ ” added Cesar Carcamo of the Mennonite organisation.

The result is an unprecedented wave of migration of Central American children to the US, most of them unaccompanied by adults.

The Texas border has become ground zero for the latest immigration surge, forcing President Barack Obama to describe it as a humanitarian crisis.

Vanna Slaughter, division director for Catholic Charities of Dallas Immigration and Legal Services is still shocked by how this crisis has unfolded.

“How did this happen with us being caught unaware?” she said.

“We will be shortsighted if we don’t make the connection to the turmoil in Central American civil wars and the impact this will have in Texas for years to come.”

But the rumours of a relaxed US policy have at least a grain of truth, Carcamo and Garcia Lobo said.

A new hope ... a Mexican boy looks at a member of the US Border Patrol standing guard on the border between El Paso in the United States and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Picture: Jesus AlacazarSource:AFP

Late in 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law a measure that guarantees protections and hearings for minors who arrive at the border without parents from countries other than Mexico and Canada.

Republicans want to change the law to allow Central American migrants to be treated the same as unaccompanied youths arriving from Mexico, who can be turned around at the border without a legal hearing.

Immigration advocates and Democrats are increasingly opposed because they say many migrants are fleeing horrific gang violence and should not be sent back.

WHY ISN’T THE US WELCOMING THESE KIDS WITH OPEN ARMS?

Anger has been spreading throughout the southwest of America with a wave of protests in states where they are being detained in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Though largely considered a humanitarian crisis, the influx of immigrants has also become political fodder.

Americans are wary of granting refugee status to children crossing the US border, and most in an Associated Press poll say the US does not have a moral obligation to accept asylum seekers generally.

The new poll found 53 per cent of Americans believe the US has no moral obligation to offer asylum to people who escape violence or political persecution, while 44 per cent believe it has that responsibility.

And more than half, 52 per cent, say children who say they are fleeing gang violence in Central America should not be treated as refugees, while 46 per cent say they should.

In Murrieta, California, protests gained national attention this month when the city’s mayor and residents blocked buses carrying immigrant children who were going to be processed there.

In Arizona, protesters carrying “Return to Sender” and “Go home non-Yankees” signs faced off with immigrant rights activists after a sheriff said a bus filled with Central American children was on its way.

The rallies demonstrated the deep divide of the immigration debate as groups on both sides.

It has become intense at times, with shouting matches and a group of mariachi musicians getting shoved before the skirmishes were quelled.

“We are not going to tolerate illegals forced upon us,” said protester Loren Woods.

Many do not what the children to be processed and transferred to temporary shelters and schools which are already overflowing.

Making a stand ... Leszek Sulanowski, from Deford, Michigan, holds up a sign calling for a secured border during a protest. Picture: Detroit News, Elizabeth ConleySource:AP

When the children arrive, the Department of Health and Human Services gives each child a health screening and immunisations, and assigns a short-term shelter.

Children stay in a shelter an average of 35 days.

They are then placed with a family member or sponsor in the United States, where they remain during the process. Many do not return to their homeland.

Feeling is mutual ... demonstrators with signs on an overpass in Indianapolis, to protest against people who immigrate illegally. Picture: Darron CummingsSource:AP

WHAT IS THE US GOVERNMENT DOING TO HELP?

The White House has taken steps, pressuring countries like Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras to step up efforts to stem the flight, sometimes of entire families, including toddlers.

President Barack Obama has urged Congress to approve $3.7 billion in emergency funds to help government agencies handle the influx of unaccompanied children.

Obama recently visited Texas and publicly warned parents in Central America not to send their children to the United States on a trek often organised by smuggling rings and criminal groups.

Looking for a new home ... Salvadorian immigrant Stefany Marjorie, 8, watches as a US Border Patrol agent records family information in Mission, Texas. Picture: John MooreSource:AFP

Republicans have, however, baulked at Obama’s plan — saying it wrongly prioritises dealing with illegal immigrants who have already crossed the border rather than deterring new entrants.

Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry has also activated the National Guard to deal with the border, issued a blistering statement.

“It’s beyond belief that Congress is abandoning its post while our border crisis continues to create humanitarian suffering, and criminal aliens still represent a clear threat to our citizens and our nation,” he said.

In a stunning series of stops and starts to resolve the border crisis today, the House of Representatives debated a bill to help resolve the flow of unaccompanied children over the southeastern border.

But Republican leaders, facing defeat, pulled it from the floor only to reverse course after an outcry from supporters.

The House Republican Conference met this afternoon and will meet again tomorrow morning, with a vote possible later in the day.

Emotions were high on the House floor as speakers on both sides talked about the urgency of the crisis.

Locked up ... detainees sleep in a holding cell at a US Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville, Texas. Picture: Eric GaySource:AP

The chaotic scene in the House of Representatives this week is now over a pared-down, short-term $659 million bill.

Proposed by the Republicans, it is meant to help restore order to the border, to process and deport incoming immigrants more quickly by changing a 2008 anti-human trafficking law, and to help Central American countries repatriate them.

But House Democrats largely have refused to go along with their package, especially because of the proposed change in the 2008 law.

That law, signed by President George W. Bush, was designed to protect young illegal immigrants from Central America from sex traffickers. It requires that the children be provided access to legal counsel and places them under the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is required to promptly placed them “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.”

Crowded space ... immigrants who have been detained while crossing the border are held inside the McAllen Border Patrol Station in McAllen, Texas. Picture: Los Angeles Times, Rick LoomisSource:AP

A short while later, a $2.7 billion Democratic alternative to ease the crisis at the border perished in the Senate, blocked by Republicans and two Democrats seeking the right to seek changes.

The result is what looks like a stalemate, with little time left to resolve it because Congress’ annual August recess is just around the corner.

“Unfortunately, it looks like we’re on a track to do absolutely nothing,” Republican Senator John Cornyn, said.

It comes even as Homeland Security officials plead for action, saying that overstressed border and immigration agencies will run out of money in the next two months.